Introduction

This document will cover the setup and preparation of the ownCloud
server to support the use of Oracle as a backend database.

Outline of Steps

This document will cover the following steps:

Setup of the ownCloud user in Oracle: This involves setting up a user
space in Oracle for setting up the ownCloud database.

Installing the Oracle Instant Client on the Web server (facilitating
the connection to the Oracle Database).

Compiling and installing the Oracle PHP Plugin oci8 module

Pointing ownCloud at the Oracle database in the initial setup process

The document assumes that you already have your Oracle instance running,
and have provisioned the needed resources. It also assumes that you have
installed ownCloud with all of the prerequisites.

Configuring Oracle

Setting up the User Space for ownCloud

Step one, if it has not already been completed by your
DBA (DataBase Administrator), provision a user space on the Oracle
instance for ownCloud. This can be done by logging in as a DBA and
running the script below:

Install the OCI8 PHP Extension

With the Oracle packages installed you’re now ready to install PHP’s
OCI8 extension.

Provide: instantclient,/usr/lib/oracle/12.2/client64/lib when requested, or let it auto-detect the location (if possible).

pecl install oci8

With the extension installed, you now need to configure it, by creating
a configuration file for it. You can do so using the command below,
substituting FILE_PATH with one from the list below the command.

Configuration File Paths

Debian & Ubuntu

RedHat, Centos, & Fedora

Validating the Extension

With all that done, confirm that it’s been installed and available in
your PHP distribution, run the following command:

php -m | grep -i oci8

When the process has completed, assuming that you don’t encounter any
errors, restart Apache and the extension is ready to use.

Configure ownCloud

The next step is to configure the ownCloud instance to point to the
Oracle Database, again this document assumes that ownCloud has
previously been installed.

Configuration Wizard

Database user

This is the user space created in step 2.1. In our Example this would be
owncloud.

Database password

Again this is defined in the script from section 2.1 above, or
pre-configured and provided to you by your DBA.

Database Name

Represents the database or the service that has been pre-configured on
the TSN Listener on the Database Server. This should also be provided by
the DBA. In this example, the default setup in the Oracle install was
orcl (there is a TSN Listener entry for orcl on our database server).

This is not like setting up with MySQL or SQL Server, where a database
based on the name you give is created. The oci8 code will call this
specific service and it must be active on the TSN Listener on your
Oracle Database server.

Database Table Space

Provided by the DBA. In this example the users table space (as is seen
in the user creation script above), was used.

Configuration File

Assuming all of the steps have been followed to completion, the first
run wizard should complete successfully, and an operating instance of
ownCloud should appear.